Vote for Joe

We met with a group of Hispanic immigrant families who are all part of the Alterna Project in LaGrange Tuesday night.   They live in a cluster of homes on Jefferson Street here as part of a “housing co-op.”   Social justice advocate, and former La Grange College professor,  Anton Flores bought these homes and has entered into a cooperative agreement with the immigrant families.   Flores has structured it so these families are paying for these homes basically at cost.   Flores told me what motivates him is “Christian love…”   This evening our family heard a tremendously poignant story from a family who came to  La Grange  some 10 years ago.   Farm working jobs had dried up in Vera Cruz, Mexico, and the family had moved to crowded Mexico City for work.   The father began working for a distribution company and was making a mere $50 a week.   They lived in one room,  not much larger than the size  of a typical American storage shed.   His salary was just enough to make rent and food each month in Mexico.   He had a wife and a six-year-old son.   They were desperately trapped in a poverty loop, with seemingly “no way to get ahead.”   And they lived in an area infested with drugs, violence and gangs.   “We were continually afraid to go outside on the street,” the wife said.   There were regular robberies, homicides, child abductions…   They were torn.   While the family  didn’t want to leave their extended family, their homeland, their culture… “Besides the danger, we weren’t even able to afford shoes for our child,” said the mother.   They decided to come here where the father got a job as a house painter and eventually started making enough to “get ahead a bit.”   They also had another child  and are quite involved with the Alterna community now.   “Here there is safety for our children — and they never go without shoes,” the mother added, a tear coming to her eye.

We’re in motion on yet another series of tours for Campaign 2012…   Heading south on I-75 through Tennessee, we saw a billboard that simply read:   Less Speed.   Less Pollution…   We make it a point of driving no faster than 55 mph on the highway, no matter what the speed limit is.   Because of the pollution, and safety…   In Canton, Georgia, there’s a sign in the YMCA locker room asking members to keep their showers to five minutes, to save water.   To saver water, and energy, it’s my belief all Americans should be taking, like,  three minute GI showers.   “Tough talk for tough times,” our new campaign motto goes…   In La Grange, Georgia, I talked with Dustin and Jamie White, who are in the area from Ohio on a Christian mission.   The Whites periodically take homeless people into their place.   Dustin talked of one man they’d helped who had been on the streets, then got into recovery for cocaine addiction, reunited with his family and has a solid job now.   And it was this young couples’  willingness to risk  that helped get the ball rolling.   Tough people for tough times.   How do we end homelessness in America?   Well for one, more people like the Whites.

I recently gave a talk at the University of Notre Dame.   It was sponsored, in part, by ND’s Center for Social Concerns.   The Center is recognized nationally for it’s community-based learning courses.   What’s more, students do “immersion experiences” in gang war zones in Chicago, migrant farm labor camps in Florida, in the back woods of Appalachia…   Students also go throughout the Third World to help with providing food, health care, adequate housing, education… for those in dire need of all of these.   In addition, the Center sponsors seminars on such subjects as: human trafficking, authentic human development, poverty…   Executive Director Rev. William Lies, points to Catholic Church teaching that explains:   “Solidarity is not a feeling of vague compassion or shallow distress at the misfortunes of so many people, both near and far.   On the contrary, it is a firm and persevering determination to commit oneself to the common good…”   Average Joe translation:   If we know 24,000 people are starving to death every day in the world, we in America need to be sacrificing our butts off (way less food, way less energy use, way less entertainment…), so people in the Third World can have at least the basics in adequate food, medicine, shelter…   That is, if we’re taking the Gospel message seriously.

I talked to Professor Mike Hebbeler’s senior-level course on discernment and vocation Friday at the University of Notre Dame.   I said that we, so often, have a neat, rational set of plans for our future based, well, on our own will.   When, it’s my belief, we should be praying in earnest for what God’s will is for our life.   Now while that’s a lot riskier, I told the students it is the essence of what will change our world.   One of the students, who was on a fast track to become a doctor, said he’s discerned he should take a couple years off to do volunteer work in Latin America.   And that’s what he’s going to do.   We need a whole lot more of that.

Haiti…   Before the earthquake, Haiti was the second poorest country in the world.   To quell persistent, acute hunger pains, a significant number of people there were eating patties made of mud, oil and flour.   While this was slowly killing these people, apparently it was better than immediately dying of starvation.   Meanwhile in America, significant numbers of people think nothing of spending all kinds of money on non-nutritional junk food and beverage (as opposed to taking the savings to send to Haiti, Uganda, Somalia…).   We had the chance to help Haiti before.   We have the chance to help Haiti now. It’s important we do that.   Not only for them… but for our souls.   Note:   While in Virginia on a campaign tour several years ago, a woman told me she’d just returned from a missions trip to Haiti.   And what had particularly struck her was “…how stick thin almost everyone seemed to be there.”